Why a deadline is so important in Marketing

One way to get your clients to TAKE ACTION..

I’m writing this in the first week of January, a time when I get a lot of new and old clients sheepishly coming in the office to ask if I can do their tax return before 31st January deadline.

These clients usually feel like they are the only person on the planet to leave it this late, however, we’re a nation of procrastinators.

According to the Financial Times, last year, of the 10.8m people that submitted a tax return 768,905 were submitted on the 31st January – and that was a Sunday!!

So why is this relevant to marketing?

Just imagine the chaos if HMRC didn’t set a deadline for Self-Assessments, would the majority of people get around to submitting their tax return??

The same goes for your marketing … you could have a well-crafted offer for something the person reading it needs, however, if you don’t have a deadline on it are they ever going to pick up the phone and ring you.

Our lives are so busy in this digital age and, if you’re like me, you need something to get to the top of your list for it to become a priority.

You need to remind yourself that your customers are probably just as busy, so it’s crucial that you grab their attention and make whatever your offering become a priority.

Deadlines are a fantastic way of doing this.

How this recently happened to me…

Over the first 6 months of 2018 my focus is to build my personal brand as I want to help other bookkeepers become bookkeeping companies.

To do this I had a list of “to do’s”, one of which was to create on-line courses but this wasn’t my top priority. I was hoping to establish my brand first, but then Shaa Wasmund popped into my Facebook life.

She was offering a course on “How to run simple on-line courses” (ironic as that sounds) and I felt that it was something I would be extremely interested in when the time was right.

Shaa had other ideas.

She set a very specific deadline for signing up for this course.

The next one wouldn’t be available until 2019 – yes 2019 … way after when I would be ready to participate.

She also limited the numbers of people who could sign up, once their quota was full the subscription would be turned off. After all, she could only help so many people at the same time without diminishing the value she could give.

I, like many others would have, took a week to consider it, asking business groups I’m involved in whether they thought I could add this to my already full to do list for the next 6 months, and watched as every email came in reiterating the reasons as to why I needed to press the “Sign up now” button.

Guess which day I eventually took the plunge to sign up… you guessed it, less than 24 hours before the deadline.

Without that deadline I’d still have “Write an on-line course” on my to-do list for sometime in the future..

And that leads me on nicely to the key question you might want to ask yourself.

How can you make this work for you?

If you’re a landscape gardener then maybe you could you offer to mow the lawn for free when you tidy up the trees and bushes (if they agree by XXpm on XXdate)..

Or perhaps offer to mow the lawn for free for the first 10 people that take you up on the offer before the end of the month.

Anyway you get the idea.. add a deadline and increase the urgency for your prospective client to take immediate action.